Excerpt

This volume examines the emergence of premodern states around the globe. In at least Old Kingdom Egypt, Lower Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Shang China, Protohistoric Hawai’i, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, societies evolved complex structures without a preexisting model to follow. Chapter authors undertake comparative analysis to better understand the similarities in processes found in the Old and New Worlds and to build stronger hypotheses about general developments in sociocultural evolution. They also consider secondary states and negative examples—that is, where states did not develop even in seemingly favorable ecological settings. While theoretical interest in the emergence of early states has had a long history in archaeological research, as the authors in this book show, the availability of recent research findings across the world and complexity science methodologies now allow new and more refined thinking than was previously possible on this key topic. Now we can ask more detailed questions about the processes underlying early state formation. What is the appropriate unit of analysis for studying state emergence? What are the implications of changing statuses and roles for elites and followers at the time of state formation? What are the key factors in the evolution of social, political, economic, and religious complexity?

Defining the Early State

In order to address such questions of state formation, which so captivate archaeologists’ imaginations, we need to start with a more basic one: How do we know an early state when we see one? Thatis, what basic characteristics do early states share, and did states undergo similar processual changes to become states? In Part I, we start with Henry Wright’s review of archaeologists’ working definitions of early states from the nineteenth century to today in order to contextualize the efforts of archaeologists who are grappling with the issues surrounding the emergence of states. Wright discusses the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, most of which focus on just one or a few processes that mark the transition from agricultural villages to centrally organized states. He suggests that complexity science methods are already greatly refining how archaeologists determine the nonlinear interdependence of processes that resulted in the early states. Laura Fortunato (in chapter 3) follows Wright’s discussion with a very helpful historical review of comparative interdisciplinary approaches to studying the development of complex societies. In particular, she discusses the utility, as well as some problems with the definitional approaches, of the Outline of Archaeological Traditions (Peregrine 2001) and the Encyclopedia of Prehistory (Peregrine and Ember 2001–2002), two of the key comparative tools used by archaeologists. If archaeologists are to reach the comparative goals of the authors in this book, then answers to the questions raised in chapter 3 will have to be further refined.

In Part II, Paula Sabloff and Skyler Cragg (chapter 4), examine how status-and-role, a well-established concept in anthropology, can provide a new way to understand archaic states. The authors have adapted anthropologist Ralph Linton’s original concept in a comparative analysis of primary and secondary premodern states and have contrasted them with a few non-state traditions in order to answer the following questions: Are state-level societies organized according to the same statuses? Are non-states organized differently? If so, do non-states share the same statuses as states? Do non-state-level societies have people playing the same roles (i.e., having the same rights, responsibilities, and behaviors) as people in state-level societies? What do the patterns say about archaic state organization?

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